Sorry. I know that these lyrics from that execrable song by the one-hit wonder Baha Men have probably already wormed their way into the deepest crevasses of your brain, where they will fester, continually playing just below your level of consciousness and eventually causing you to curse your very existence. (You are not alone — although released in 2000, Who Let the Dogs Out? is still number three on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of top 20 most annoying songs ever.) The thing is, I had to mention these lyrics because versions of them, inspired by vicious pit bulls whose owner feeds them Tabasco sauce to keep them mean, figure prominently in Martin Amis’s Lionel Asbo, an acidic satire on contemporary England by one of that country’s most controversial and caustic wits, and according to the London Times, one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.

The England that Amis portrays in Lionel Asbo is not the stiff-upper-lipped one, nor the one of this past summer, with all its jolly Union Jack — painted faces and Olympic Games — inspired shows of patriotism (which, actually, seemed a little out of character for the denizens of Old Blighty, who usually consider chest-thumping nationalist chauvinism something only those awful Americans do). Instead, the England of Lionel Asbo is a country of a deeply disturbed and disturbing character — of riots, looting, crime (think of the summer of 2011), urban blight, despair, soccer hooligans and sociopathic thugs. And “lotto louts” such as Michael Carroll, who in 2003 won a huge lottery and proceeded to make over the grounds of his new villa into a 24-hour racetrack for old cars. Lionel Asbo is an exaggerated version of Carroll. He was born Lionel Pepperdine in a fictionalized London borough called Diston, where “nothing — and no one — was over sixty years old” and where “calamity made its rounds like a postman.” He is in his early 20s and in jail when he changes his last name to Asbo, which is an acronym for anti-social behaviour order, because he likes the sound of the word. He is a violent, woman-beating, thick-witted criminal (working at the “very hairiest end of debt collection”) who seems destined to carry on his nasty and brutish life, punctuated by frequent prison stays, until he wins an enormous fortune — 140 million pounds — in the National Lottery, using a filched ticket (Lionel thinks lotteries are a mug’s game). As a newly minted multimillionaire, he moves into a hotel for rock stars, hires a public relations manager to deal with the constant media attention and takes up with a model and poet named “Threnody.” The quotation marks are part of her legal name.

Even a villain has some good qualities, though. Asbo’s is his intense loyalty to his family, especially to his intelligent and sensitive nephew, Des, who has been his ward since the death of Des’s mother. At the beginning of the novel Des is 15, and — warning! high ick factor ahead — having an affair with his grandmother, the inaccurately named Grace. To be fair, she is only 39 years old, having born seven children by the age of 19, and poor Des is just looking for some tenderness. Still, he knows that Grace’s sexual escapades infuriate Uncle Li, and if the affair were to be discovered, things would not go well for him, family loyalty notwithstanding.

Soon enough, though, the affair ends. Des moves in with a nice girl, and they have a child. He gets a scholarship and finishes school and begins work as a reporter. And even though his uncle has not given him a tuppence of the vast fortune he has illicitly won, Des is happy. His only worry is that Grace, who has been diagnosed with early-onset dementia and sent to live in a facility in Scotland (a bit of an authorial contrivance, if ever there was one), will spill the beans about the affair in one of her lucid moments. This is where the pit bulls come in. Or out. Depending on your point of view.

There is something a bit haphazard about the plot of Lionel Asbo, but perhaps more than with any other writer, one reads Amis for energetic, funny, idiosyncratic and biting use of language, here used to brilliant effect to parse the politics of present-day England. In an interview with France’s Le Nouvel Observateur, Amis states that the story of Lionel Asbo is a fitting metaphor for the current state of “moral decrepitude” in Britain, where you can have no talent and no ambition and still get lots of money (Oh, England, you are not alone in this). “This book, then, is about the decline of my country,” he says, “about anger, dissatisfaction and bitterness.” And if the events and characters seem over the top, consider this quote from the real lotto winner, Michael Carroll: “If anyone was nice to me ’cos of my 10 million (pounds) Lotto winnings,” he said, “I’d stab ’em.”

Lionel Asbo lives.

Karen Virag is a local freelance reviewer.

Comments

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.